After my tutorial on the 24th of May, several interesting questions arose. Some which I had already thought about and many that I yet haven’t come across. Listening to my tutor’s perspective on my project helped me gain new insight into what I was doing, and together we shared a discussion about the possibilities and directions in which this project can go.
What is my infrastructure? What will my interventions be? Who will I focus on? What are my categories and what will be my role in my own project? What are my intentions with this project and research? What to do when doubt kicks in? Where do I focus my research? What am I trying to achieve?
We also discussed the issue with self-doubt and blockage; usually a constant in research and creative practises. For example, what happens when you start doubting your research question? what are the key elements to keep in mind when insecurities start creeping in? and then from my discussion with my tutor he mentioned something extremely relevant (in regards to impostor syndrome and insecurities):
“There is always a reason to add; to have something else”.
David Mills
The above resonated with me because as an early-stage researcher, it is incredibly easy to start questioning your authority and agency in leading research from cross-disciplinary field, it is easy to start questioning your own experience and allow fear of the ordinary to creep in. Now, what I mean with fear of the ordinary is that we, through our research, do not end up accomplishing anything extraordinary – that it does not end up going anywhere nor contributing to a cause. That in itself is scary. It’s a conflicting feeling between auto-dissapointment and disappointing others.
My next steps are to identify what will my infrastructure be; at the moment due to covid doing on-site hospital experiences feels a bit out of reach, however building a strong relationship with hospitals will be able to provide that bridge for later on. Currently, the key is to focus on understanding what do patients need, what do hospitals need and what doctors see as the important aspects of improvement of quality of life. I then need to decide whether to focus on hospitalised patients, patients that have a long term treatment (are constantly going to the hospital) but are not hospitalised, and or paediatric patients (complete different audience from adults needs).
When thinking of infrastructure, it was discussed that a media platform could be a solid starting point if we were to understand the content that would be showed. I then need to decide and clarify whether I’d want to focus on patient-centred hospital media, yet this still feels individualised, or focus on a more community-experience-centred approach.
My next steps are to organise direct data collection systems and interviews with different doctors to understand the needs; once I understand the ethical procedures of data, I’d focus on gathering the direct data from patients.
As an overall summary, the next steps is to gather direct information (primary research data) from an established hospital institutions and its primary figures as well as formulate a clear intervention plan to move forward. Also, focus on what direction will this research project go and how will I use it as a foundation of the direction I’d like to go.